Migration Case Study: Analysis of Top 3 Countries by Migration Outflows
Project by Andres Montes Lopez, Richa Gupta, Samikshya Siwakoti, Maximilian Rychwalski
Introduction
2017 World Migration Flows
The world
The Beginning
The number of international migrants in 2019 was estimated at 270 million. According to migrant data collected in 2017, one in every 30 people in this world is living outside of their country of birth.
Nearly two-thirds of the migrants are looking for work. But there have been massive displacements due to ongoing conflicts and violence. IOM’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre has said that a total of 41.3 million people were forced to flee their homes at the end of 2018 – a record since monitoring began in 1998.
We were interested in exploring more about this topic.
The most recent data in World Bank is available for the year 2017.
This graph shows that some countries stand out with higher than normal immigration like Bahrain, Maldives and Oman whereas some other countries are standing out because of all the people moving out of them. For example in Syria, for every 100 people in the country 12 people are moving to other countries.
We are interested in understanding what are the reasons that are making these people move out of their home countries.
We are removing Puerto Rico from our observations due to the fact that it is a part of United States and most of the migration that Puerto Rico faces is still inside of the country.
We are more interested in seeing the movement of people within countries and the reasons due to which this happens.
Word Cloud and Common Themes in News Coverages
As part of our analysis, we also looked at the most frequent common words that appeared in the article coverages that mentioned migration related terms for each of the top 3 countries of interest. In doing so, we utilized Web article coverages from Factiva database for 2019. The year was chosen to focus on the discussion surrounding the issues of immigrants prior to the COVID pandemic. The overall wordcloud from the corpus of articles is given below. It is followed by the top terms for each country from the set of common terms that existed in separate corpuses by country.
Venezuela
The Present
Venezuela is a country located at the northern end of South America. It occupies a roughly triangular area that is larger than the combined areas of France and Germany.
The economy of Venezuela is a market-based mixed economy based largely on the petroleum and manufacturing sectors, and has been in a state of total economic collapse since the mid-2010s. This has aled to a mass-exodus of people from the country which has been facing an economic and political turmoil since a long time.
The GDP per capita growth has been dipping since reaching its peak in 2004.
Let us see what the migration trends of the country has been.
A very large number of migrants from Venezuela are refugees and asylum seekers who have moved to other countries to search for a safe haven.
This map shows the destinations of the refugees and asylum seekers from Venezuela in the year 2019.
The Future
South Sudan
The Present
Made up of the 10 southern-most states of Sudan, South Sudan is one of the most diverse countries in Africa. It is home to over 60 different major ethnic groups, and the majority of its people follow traditional religions.
South Sudan gained independence from Sudan on 9 July 2011 as the outcome of a 2005 agreement that ended Africa’s longest-running civil war. Independence did not bring conflict in South Sudan to an end. Civil war broke out in 2013 when the president fell out with his then vice president, leading to a conflict that has displaced some 4 million people.
A very large number of migrants from South Sudan are refugees and asylum seekers who have moved to other countries to search for a safe haven.
This map shows the destinations of the refugees and asylum seekers from South Sudan in the year 2019.
The Future
Syria
The Present
After Syria gained its independence in 1946, political life in the country was highly unstable, owing in large measure to intense friction between the country’s social, religious, and political groups. In 1970 Syria came under the authoritarian rule of Pres. Hafiz al-Assad. After Assad’s death in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad became president. Bashar al-Assad ultimately continued his father’s authoritarian style of governments to quash political dissent. Long-suppressed internal tensions led to the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011.
A very large number of migrants from Syria are refugees and asylum seekers who have moved to other countries to search for a safe haven.
This map shows the destinations of the refugees and asylum seekers from Syria in the year 2019.
